I've been trolling for years, but I finally have a problem worthy of asking....
I will try to provide as much information as possible here, in order to present as much of the facts as possible. While this had been going on for most of 2005, I will focus on December as it is the month where we have the most pertinent data and the most obvious click fraud.
I am one of the administrators / programmers of a subscription based website with a monthly subscription base of approximately 13,500 paying members. We advertise with Google in several ways, one of which was AdWords, with the option of being in their "search partner network, which includes members of Google AdSense for domains". We have been pleased with the returns from the other advertising we had done with Google in general, and had not closely watched the individual returns/rates of our accounts. I will wholeheartedly admit that this is an obvious omission on our part. If we had paid closer attention, or known to pay closer attention, we could have saved ourselves some of the financial loss.
With several of on our staff being both owners and programmers, we keep mountains of data, including a database of every visitor to the site for the past 60 days. Included in that visitor database is the referrer, any search words that were in the URL of the referring page, and the URL of the referring page. From this information and Google's own reports, this is what we found.
In the first 3 weeks of December, the AdWords account accrued 6,000 pay per clicks. Of those clicks, 2,000 originated from Google's own search, and another 200 or so from AOL's search. The click ratio to membership sale on these are 7.5:1 and 4.7:1 respectively. This is equivalent with our other advertising accounts with Google. However, there were listed 2 referrers, "landing.domainsponsor.com" and "searchportal.information.com" (both of which forward to "www.information.com" if you browse to that address), with 1800 and 2500 clicks respectively. The paid click to membership sale ratio of these are an astounding 900:1 and 630:1. The cost of the Pay Per Click on these two sites resulted in charges of over $7,500, making the cost approximately $900 per sale. As our normal membership runs a meager $19.95, this loss of $880 per sale in advertising costs is ?prohibitive to our future business plans?.
When we contacted Google's support in relation to these outrageous numbers, we encountered several dead ends - the customer support representative would simply say that these are natural fluctuations in Internet traffic. Since the 20th of December, we have been accumulating data and presenting it to Google's Customer support. The response is always, "We will forward your concerns to our Fraud Division", at which point several days go by before we receive a generic email stating (and I quote)
After a thorough investigation, our team was unable to find any conclusive evidence of invalid clicks in your account. The clicks you received are typical of normal user and system behavior...
...
We've found that AdWords ads showing on parked domain name pages often receive clicks from well-qualified leads within the advertisers' markets.
As a result, the return on investment for these pages can be comparable to that of search pages.
In a final act of desperation today, we did an IP address lookup on a 10% sampling of the IP addresses logged for visitors from "searchportal.information.com". The results were absolutely laughable.
Asia Pacific Network Information Centre - 28%
Reseaux IP Europeens (Africa/Europe) - 47%
Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry - 20%
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) - 1%
To put it bluntly, 1% of the traffic from searchportal.information.com would even find our site relevant, as our market is fairly exclusively targeting the United States and Canada. It is no small wonder so few sales originated from traffic from this site - as an entirely English speaking website, the individual (or script) clicking on our links most likely couldn't understand a word of English!
Again, when presented with this information, it was sent to the Fraud Division, and received the same answer via email. When we asked to speak with the Fraud Division, we were told that the do not take any voice messages. When asked to speak to the individual's superior or supervisor, we were told that he was as far up the chain as we would ever get.
Our next and only remaining option (besides bend over and take it) is to contact an attorney. I feel that the case that could be made against Google is, beyond a shadow of doubt, valid and that we would win if it did indeed go to court. Unfortunately, we still rely on Google for too significant amount of our traffic to afford losing them completely as an advertiser, which I imagine would happen in a situation like this. Does anyone have any suggestion, similar story, or word of advice to give?
I am available to be reached any reasonable hour (Eastern Standard).
Nathan
(412) 260-2524
nathan@goacolyte.com
I will try to provide as much information as possible here, in order to present as much of the facts as possible. While this had been going on for most of 2005, I will focus on December as it is the month where we have the most pertinent data and the most obvious click fraud.
I am one of the administrators / programmers of a subscription based website with a monthly subscription base of approximately 13,500 paying members. We advertise with Google in several ways, one of which was AdWords, with the option of being in their "search partner network, which includes members of Google AdSense for domains". We have been pleased with the returns from the other advertising we had done with Google in general, and had not closely watched the individual returns/rates of our accounts. I will wholeheartedly admit that this is an obvious omission on our part. If we had paid closer attention, or known to pay closer attention, we could have saved ourselves some of the financial loss.
With several of on our staff being both owners and programmers, we keep mountains of data, including a database of every visitor to the site for the past 60 days. Included in that visitor database is the referrer, any search words that were in the URL of the referring page, and the URL of the referring page. From this information and Google's own reports, this is what we found.
In the first 3 weeks of December, the AdWords account accrued 6,000 pay per clicks. Of those clicks, 2,000 originated from Google's own search, and another 200 or so from AOL's search. The click ratio to membership sale on these are 7.5:1 and 4.7:1 respectively. This is equivalent with our other advertising accounts with Google. However, there were listed 2 referrers, "landing.domainsponsor.com" and "searchportal.information.com" (both of which forward to "www.information.com" if you browse to that address), with 1800 and 2500 clicks respectively. The paid click to membership sale ratio of these are an astounding 900:1 and 630:1. The cost of the Pay Per Click on these two sites resulted in charges of over $7,500, making the cost approximately $900 per sale. As our normal membership runs a meager $19.95, this loss of $880 per sale in advertising costs is ?prohibitive to our future business plans?.
When we contacted Google's support in relation to these outrageous numbers, we encountered several dead ends - the customer support representative would simply say that these are natural fluctuations in Internet traffic. Since the 20th of December, we have been accumulating data and presenting it to Google's Customer support. The response is always, "We will forward your concerns to our Fraud Division", at which point several days go by before we receive a generic email stating (and I quote)
After a thorough investigation, our team was unable to find any conclusive evidence of invalid clicks in your account. The clicks you received are typical of normal user and system behavior...
...
We've found that AdWords ads showing on parked domain name pages often receive clicks from well-qualified leads within the advertisers' markets.
As a result, the return on investment for these pages can be comparable to that of search pages.
In a final act of desperation today, we did an IP address lookup on a 10% sampling of the IP addresses logged for visitors from "searchportal.information.com". The results were absolutely laughable.
Asia Pacific Network Information Centre - 28%
Reseaux IP Europeens (Africa/Europe) - 47%
Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry - 20%
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) - 1%
To put it bluntly, 1% of the traffic from searchportal.information.com would even find our site relevant, as our market is fairly exclusively targeting the United States and Canada. It is no small wonder so few sales originated from traffic from this site - as an entirely English speaking website, the individual (or script) clicking on our links most likely couldn't understand a word of English!
Again, when presented with this information, it was sent to the Fraud Division, and received the same answer via email. When we asked to speak with the Fraud Division, we were told that the do not take any voice messages. When asked to speak to the individual's superior or supervisor, we were told that he was as far up the chain as we would ever get.
Our next and only remaining option (besides bend over and take it) is to contact an attorney. I feel that the case that could be made against Google is, beyond a shadow of doubt, valid and that we would win if it did indeed go to court. Unfortunately, we still rely on Google for too significant amount of our traffic to afford losing them completely as an advertiser, which I imagine would happen in a situation like this. Does anyone have any suggestion, similar story, or word of advice to give?
I am available to be reached any reasonable hour (Eastern Standard).
Nathan
(412) 260-2524
nathan@goacolyte.com
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